My City 4: The Brodie-Snatcher

THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE.

Miss Jean Brodie and her girls are spied upon by Robert Stephens from his artist’s garrett as they walk through Greyfriars Churchyard. This is a key location in all versions of GREYFRIARS BOBBY (where the wee dug sits by his master’s grave) and also in Val Lewton and Robert Wise’s film THE BODY SNATCHER, which conflates the Burke and Hare story (as filtered through Robert Louis Stevenson’s fictionalization) with that of Bobby, who is disguised under the stage name Robbie. The low-budget Lewton makes do with an establishing shot of some other church and then plunges into the studio.

The real churchyard (or kirkyard, if you want to be sectarian about it) is quite a place, although difficult to capture on film — the real frissons come from extreme details of the weathered stonework, angels and deathsheads with their features eaten away by wind and rain. But it’s also a useful place because you can look in all directions without much chance of seeing anything too modern.

Fiona and I used to live on Forrest Road, overlooking the cemetery just like Robert Stephens, although I starved one flight up, rather than in a garrett. Trilby, Fiona’s then cat, and my current avatar, once escaped out the window, over another rooftop, and into the hallowed grounds. She returned unharmed the next day, which was a relief, since she was a housecat unused to the ways of the exterior. I don’t know what she’d have done if she’d met Greyfriars Bobby’s ghost — and remember, according to the ancient Egyptians (generally reliable) cats can see the spirits of the departed. You know when you catch your cat staring fixedly at nothing…?

A strange feature of the place, just about visible above, is the way some of the grave markers are actually built into the walls of residences surrounding the graveyard. Also, many of the graves are enclosed in little stone buildings with gates that lock, which is largely a protection against body-snatchers. St John’s Churchyard, a short distance away on the corner of Princes Street and Lothian Road, even has a watch-tower to allow a guard to keep an eye out for nocturnal speculators armed with shovels.

The cemetery was used again in BURKE AND HARE: THE MUSICAL, a film I wrote sometime in the last century. Had Burke and Hare ever actually engaged in graverobbing (which is unknown — they were arrested for mass murder, having followed the simpler practice of generating fresh corpses rather than harvesting them from the earth), Greyfriars would probably have been their local place of work.

We were allowed to plant little wooden crosses so we could pretend to dig up a fresh grave. The cemetery is apparently full of unmarked graves, including that of William McGonagall, the world’s worst poet (an influence on both WC Fields and Spike Milligan). It seems likely the grounds may have once been peppered with pauper’s markers. To fake the grave-robbery, a fake mound of earth was erected — no hole was actually dug. The corpse here is played by Simon Vickery, a talented cameraman.

A prostitute who winds up on a slab is played by genius director Morag McKinnon, whose feature debut may be getting released this year (I hope so!). And the director of B&H, Stephen Murphy, now earns a living in special makeup effects, notably on the HARRY POTTER films. Meanwhile, I have a screenplay to write, so –

[sound of echoing footsteps diminishing in the distance]

The Sunday Intertitle: Carpet of Peril

Absolutely no silent movies watched this week, so here is my favourite quasi-intertitle from a  talking picture, HELP!

I like this one even better than the splendidly redundant “A strangled cry from the top of the stairs” in Bryan Forbes’ THE WRONG BOX, which is followed by the sound of a strangled cry from the top of the stairs, emitted by Peter Cook.

In the scene illustrated above, Sir Paul McCartney, injected with a shrink serum, is diminished to Grant Williams-like proportions, emerging naked from his own trouser leg, long before it was fashionable to do so. I suggest that any directorial career which could encompass a scene such as the one above as well as one where Sean Connery and Robert Shaw batter each other with maces, is a rich and fascinating one.

Twang!

Hollywood producer Ray Stark makes a cameo appearance.

Before we all sit down to discuss ROBIN AND MARIAN on Friday, there are a few background facts I want to spout out, as perhaps forming a useful context to the film and the director’s intentions. Richard Lester, the gleaming dome of British sixties cinema, had somewhat reinvented himself after a forced break of four years, coming back with THE THREE MUSKETEERS and its part two (not really a sequel as both halves were shot at once and intended as one film) THE FOUR MUSKETEERS. ROYAL FLASH came after that, firming up the idea that Lester was now a director of comedy swashbucklers. But while FLASH is more broadly farcical than MUSKETEERS (which has a distinct serious side and a fairly bittersweet ending), ROBIN AND MARIAN was shot under the title THE DEATH OF ROBIN HOOD, and was intended from the start as a serious and sombre film.

Reviewers often view one film through the lens of another — I can be guilty of this myself — meaning that what’s actually on the screen can either be intensified or obscured. If you read the contemporary reviews of R&M, it’s striking how critics seem to feel cheated, or disappointed at least, by the film’s solemnity. Lester has protested that “there’s not one deliberate joke in the whole film,” which is an exaggeration, I think — he can’t resist having a knight hurt his finger while loading a boulder into a siege machine, which subsequently misses its target pathetically — but his jokes derive from an acute awareness that life is, and always has, included a portion of the absurd and surreal. The comic moments are part of the film’s realism, not separate from it. My parents couldn’t work out if the film was meant to be serious or funny, and consequently disliked it. I kind of wonder how you can enjoy life if you need to make that distinction.

Along with altering the title (which would have served as a useful warning of what to expect in the film), producer Ray Stark rejected Michel Legrand’s score, held a competition among prominent movie composers for the gig, and hired John Barry, all without telling Lester. Barry dutifully provided the lush, filmic movie score Stark had demanded, ignoring Lester’s calls for a more restrained approach inspired by Sir Michael Tippett’s early string compositions. It’s possible to enjoy the Barry score as a typically romantic and sweeping work, but it tends to push a more light-hearted flavour at odds with the film’s true purposes. Since Lester was never able to finalize the Legrand score, a director’s cut is not possible.

Some violence has also been trimmed from the movie — Lester wanted to undercut any impression of fun action, more forcefully than he had in the MUSKETEERS film, where there’s a constant tension between slapstick and bloodshed — and this is weakened by trims made to the moments of brutality. The idea that an audience can be educated out of enjoying violence onscreen by being exposed to more and more extreme forms of it is a rather discredited one, I feel, but Lester always had the ability to bring in the unpleasant action in a surprising way, so he was not dependent on extremes of gore, but on extremes of contrast. It compares somewhat with Robert Altman’s sudden tonal shifts from comedy to horror.

Despite these compromises, I think we can have a fun time with this movie – -I hope to re-watch it tonight. Join me on Friday and Saturday for the post-match analysis.